During the summer of 2003, I accompanied the Edmond North High School marching band on a trip to the Oklahoma City National Memorial on the site of the Murrah building. North's marching band was doing a halftime show that fall that used the Memorial as a theme.
We toured the entire site, and let me tell you... if you don't shed tears while you're watching the archival news coverage, seeing the items that were salvaged from the remains of the building, or think about those 19 children who died, then you aren't human or don't have any emotions. Because I tried, and failed, to keep it together in front of the five students I was accompanying through the exhibits: my 17 year old son, two of his friends, and two girls I didn't know.
I still can't look at that picture of firefighter Chris Fields holding the limp body of Baylee Almon (She later died. She'd celebrated her first birthday just the day before) without tearing up. Hell, I can't even see the computer screen well enough to type this sentence... wait a sec--
Okay, I've got it together now.
I didn't live in Oklahoma in 1995, and I watched the coverage of the bombing on TV from where I was living in Chesapeake, Virginia. It still boggles my mind that two men with such hatred towards the government could blow up a building on a Tuesday morning without a care about the people inside. Men, women, chilren in the day care center... Man's cruelty to man simply astounds me. War is one thing, but this was no war as far as I'm concerned. I don't know what McVeigh and Nichols were thinking...maybe to them, it was war.
To me, it was and still is a national tragedy.
So there. Wanna argue with me, I can argue all day long.
I hope Timothy McVeigh is rotting in hell and Terry Nichols dies a slow painful death.
I AM FROM DENVER ORIGINALLY AND JUST GOT AROUND TO GOING TO THE MEMORIAL, NEEDLESS TO SAY, I WAS CRYING BECAUSE ITS SO SAD!! i THINK IF SOMEONE DOESENT GET EMOTIONALLY MOVED WHEN SEEING IT THEN SOMETHING IS WORNG WITH THEM! MYHEART GOES OUT TO ALL WHO HAVE SOMETHING RELATED TO THE BOMBING!
ReplyDeleteI cried too. I don't think anyone can make it through without.
ReplyDeleteI was in high school in Oklahoma when the bombing happened. I remember our teachers letting us and our classmates watch the coverage in class. A friend of mine dated a guy a few years back that was a police officer at the time of the bombing. He was one of the first on the scene to respond to the explosion. He and many of the other officers suffered from PTS and were not encouraged to get the help they needed. As a result, many of those guys started doing drugs, drinking heavily, gambling and such. This guy started doing all these terrible things in order to cope with the tragedy he saw first hand. Can you imagine? Anyway he was arrested for drug possession and managed to escape from the handcuffs and the police car because he was a former cop! I thought the Houdini aspect of his story was kind of cool, lol.
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